Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity
“Herein is love”
“Our life and our death are with our neighbour,” says St. Anthony the Great, according to Athanasius’ biography of the Desert Father. Anthony was an important figure in the development of Christian monasticism. Heaven and Hell, we might also say, are with with one another. Today we are given a vision of both in the Epistle and Gospel. Heaven is the love of God in us in our love for one another and Hell is our indifference to one another and thus to God.
How we think about death and dying says everything about how we think and deal with one another. The great pageant of literature and philosophy which presents us with the images of the after-life are entirely about life itself and about how we think and live with one another. That is really the main point about such great works of literature like The Epic of Gilgamesh in Enkidu’s vision of the afterworld as the house of dust, Homer’s Odyssey in Odysseus’ journey to Hades to speak with Teiresias, Plato’s Myth of Er in the Republic, Vergil’s sixth book of the Aeneid, St. John the Divine’s Revelation, Dante’s great summa, The Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faustus, the novels of Charles Williams, and many, many more. They are really profound teachings about our humanity in its relation to God and to one another. Such teachings are wonderfully concentrated for us in John’s little treatise on love in his First Epistle and in Luke’s profoundly poignant Gospel story about Dives, the rich man, and Lazarus, the poor man.
That there is a kind of role reversal in the Gospel highlights the significance of our thoughts and actions towards one another. As we saw last Sunday with Nicodemus, we have to learn to think upward, to think into the things of God. The rich man utterly ignores Lazarus lying “at his gate full of sores,” hungry and destitute, bereft of human company. It is the dogs who “came and licked his sores,” the dogs who show the compassion and charity that humans ought to show to one another. In his indifference to Lazarus, the Gospel suggests, there is equally an utter indifference to God, to the truth of our lives as lived with God and with one another. That indifference is nothing short of Hell. The Gospel highlights the “great gulf fixed” between heaven and hell. In our refusals to love one another, we separate ourselves from the love of God, the love that John saysis God. Hell is our refusal to let that love live in us.
These lessons follow directly and rightly upon the celebration of the mystery of the Trinity, the mystery of God as love: not just our love for God, not just God’s love for us, but God as love. In the Epistle we have the familiar mantra of the Trinity Season. “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him,” as found in our liturgy as one of the sentences for the Offices. The King James Version uses “dwelleth” for “abideth.” Without that love, we are nothing. We are Hell.
